We’re over the colds that ran through the family last week, but I spent a lot of the week catching up so things were mostly quiet here on the blog again. Hopefully things will be back to normal this week. Here are the articles I read this week, which took me through 34 consecutive days…

I was back to my normal reading pace in February and it came as a relief. Of course, I didn’t have a video game sucking up hours of my time like I did last month. I finished 14 books in February: Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls (#855) I’ve had an on-again,…

I started the week in New York visiting family, and with one kid sick with whatever is going around. I ended the week sick myself for a few days, with a couple sick kids on the mend, and several inches of snow in between. So things have been a little quiet here on the blog…

Over the years I have developed a pretty good sense about which books will interest me and which won’t. I don’t like wasting much time on a book that I can’t get into, and have learned to give up on them pretty quickly. Of course, there are those books that pull me right in, fiction…

A lot of driving this week. I had to drive to Pittsburgh for work on Wednesday and then back home on Thursday. Yesterday we drove up to New York for the long weekend. I still managed to read an article each day and my backlog of magazines has been shrinking nicely, just as the March…

I finished my very first audiobook, Misery by Stephen King (narrated by Lindsay Crouse) on February 23, 2013. I was thinking of this yesterday because it’s been just about six years since that first audiobook, and a strange thing happened. I was in the carpool lane at my kids’ school sitting in the rain and…

I watched Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood when I was little. As a child of the 1970s, I can recall sitting our family room in front of a television (one that you tuned by turning knobs and for which an occasional visit from a television repairman was required) watching Sesame Street, Electric Company, and, of course, Mister…

A few weeks ago I wrote about how I was going to start reading one article a day to better keep up with all of the magazines I subscribe to. Two weeks in, I thought it might be interesting to list out the articles I ended up reading each week, with links if they are…

Yesterday’s mail brought Volumes 2 and 3 of Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History. I now have the first 4 of the 12 volumes that make up the series. These books have not been easy to find. The original hardcover editions can go for hundreds of dollars. I was lucky to find paperback editions from 1962. I wasn’t…

I recently re-read Essays of E. B. White. Having done so, I am finally in agreement with those who call White the greatest essayist of the Twentieth century–at least of those that I have read. I returned to White in part to escape what seems to me a simpler time (a false notion, I’m sure, but it’s there nevertheless).…

I finished 6 books in January. Compared to last January, it’s a little better, as I read 6 books in January 2018. But compared to my monthly average for 2018–12 to 15 books per month–it seems disappointing. My main form on self-education and entertainment is reading. This is why I don’t watch much television, see…

I sometimes look at reading the way I look at eating. There are meals (novels, nonfiction books), and snacks (articles, essays, short stories). I enjoy snacks (short form reading) as much as the meals. I subscribe to a bunch of magazines and always look forward to reading through the articles in them each month–but rarely…